Murray wants border help

Senator says local agencies deserve federal funding

By JENNIFER A. DLOUHY, HEARST NEWSPAPERS

Published 10:00 pm, Friday, April 7, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers struggling to rewrite the nation's immigration laws have focused almost exclusively on sealing up the U.S. border with Mexico, ignoring important needs along the 4,000-mile U.S. boundary with Canada, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., says.

The three-term senator points to a federal program that reimburses four Southwestern states for border-related law enforcement costs. She says Congress should provide the same help to cities and counties near Canada.

Murray cites the costs incurred by local law enforcement agencies when federal agencies make arrests for border-related crimes but then dump the cases on local police and sheriff's departments.

"Our Northern border counties are spending millions of dollars on cases that are initiated by federal agencies," Murray said.

"We now have sheriff's offices who are unable to serve warrants because their jails are full."

The problem is felt all along the U.S.-Canada border, including in heavily traveled areas such as Buffalo, N.Y., and Detroit, where an influx of federal agents after the 2001 attacks has helped U.S. agents arrest more people suspected of drug trafficking and customs violations.

But in Whatcom County, an area with 180,000 people, the sheriff's department is overwhelmed with federal cases.

After Sept. 11, 2001, "we went from having 20 Border Patrol agents to 200 of them, and we've had proportional increases" in patrols from other agencies, said Whatcom County Sheriff Bill Elfo. "They're just catching more things."

Federal agents pick up crime suspects and then sometimes refer the cases to the local law enforcement offices for prosecution.

Drug-related crimes make up the bulk of these cases, but the sheriff's department and local prosecutor also handle stolen property and child-luring cases that began at the federal level.

Whatcom County now spends more than $2 million each year to process federally initiated cases.

A solution already exists for the four states along the U.S.-Mexico border. Since 2003, local law enforcement operations in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas have been able to get federal funds to reimburse them for picking up criminal cases initiated at the federal level.

The Southwest Border Prosecution Initiative was given $30 million in fiscal 2005 to reimburse state, county, tribal or city governments for the costs of prosecuting criminal cases declined by U.S. attorneys.

No similar program exists for the Northern border.

"This really is an equity issue," Murray said.

During a congressional hearing this week, Murray pressed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the issue: Would he support opening up the Southwest Border Prosecution Initiative to Northern states?

The attorney general deflected the question.

"I worry about the fact that 70 percent of our immigration cases are on the Southern border and 30 percent on the Northern border," Gonzales responded.

Gonzales added that he doesn't think the solution is using federal dollars to reimburse state and local officials.

When it comes to purely immigration-related offenses, he said, the solution is to stop foreigners at the border. That would cut down on other related crimes.

"Quite frankly, the federal government needs to do its job. It needs to do a better job of securing the border so that you don't have the kind of burden that we see today on state and local municipalities and state governments," Gonzales said. "That should be our focus in terms of focusing on reimbursement."

Murray wants to duplicate the Southwest Border Prosecution Initiative for Northern states -- or open the program to more areas.

But lawmakers from Southwestern states have generally resisted calls to expand the border prosecution program to Northern law enforcement agencies. As it is, they argue, American police forces near Mexico are competing for funds out of a limited pot of money.

Border-state senators have been working on other ways to get government dollars to cash-strapped police near Canada and Mexico.

The immigration reform bill that stalled in the Senate this week would have empowered the Department of Homeland Security to send $50 million in grants annually to local law enforcement agencies to help them combat crime associated with illegal border crossings. That program would have been open to communities along both the Northern and Southern borders -- and would have given priority to less-populated regions within 100 miles of the boundary.

Lawmakers from Washington, in the meantime, have relied on the annual federal spending process to send funds back home. For fiscal 2005, Congress gave $1 million to Whatcom County.

Without a new grant program, Murray and other lawmakers from the state are expected to try for similar earmarks this year.